28/12/2009

From the Feuilletons

From the Feuilletons is a weekly overview of what's been happening in the German-language cultural pages and appears every Friday at 3 pm. CET.. Here a key to the German newspapers.

The Case of Hans Heinrich Eggebrecht

In Die Zeit of 17 December, musicologist and historian Boris von Hakenrevealed that the late Hans Heinrich Eggebrecht (1919 - 1999), a revered German musicologist, had been a member of the Field Gendarmerie Unit 683 and as such, involved in the murder of 14,000 Jews in Crimea.Â¬â

In the Süddeutsche Zeitung on 19 December, theatre historian Jens Malter Fischer warns against an over hasty condemnation of the late musicologist: "One of the peculiar things about von Haken's article is that it leaves us entirely in the dark about Eggebrecht's actual involvement in the murders. Obviously von Haken doesn't have the least bit of evidence to prove Eggebrecht's guilt, apart from his having belonged to this unit, otherwise he would have mentioned it." At the end of his article, Fischer admits to feeling anxious about von Haken's upcoming book "Holocaust and Musicology".

A catastrophe for German musicology, writes Kai Luehrs-Kaiser in Die Welt on 21 December. "It fuels the suspicion that Eggebrecht's career would never have closed unchallenged had not the entire field repressed its past. Both German Literature Studies and Philosophy have been engaged in working through their Nazi past for a long time now, and quite systematically. (This brought to light, for example, that Walter Jens had been a member of the NSDAP). To put it provatively: in Germanmusicology, anti-Semitism stops with Richard Wagner."

On December 23, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung devotes an entire page to the revelations about Hans Heinrich Eggebrecht. Having read Boris von Haken's article, musicologist Friedrich Geiger writes that it is "probable but not certain" that Eggebrecht was involved in the murder of 14.000 Jews in Crimea. In the world of music criticism, he writes, "many people continued to think and talk as they had done in the Third Reich. These people often wielded considerable influence, as in the case of Walter Abendroth, who became head of the feuilleton for Die Zeit at the end of the war and in 1959, wrote the very popular 'Short History of Music'. Its close resemblance to Nazi discourse went largely unnoticed because many others were writing in similar, if milder terms. Anyone who now bins Eggebrecht's books in the belief that his was a unique case, is ignoring a problem which goes to heart of German musicology."

Other stories Der Tagesspiegel 21.12.2009

Thomas Lackmann remembers the uprising in Sobibor in 1943, in which 12 SS men were killed. "Claude Lanzmann's film 'Sobibor, October 14, 1943, 4PM' (2001) documents the uprising. Â¬â 'No, I had never killed anyone before, I'd never even harmed a fly,' Â¬â says Yehuda Lerner in one interview in the film. 'We realised that none of us would leave Sobibor alive. We knew we had no time to lose in this place.' Carpenters organised axes, meetings were arranged with SS men in the workshops and just before four, the electricity was turned off. The Germans were punctual as always. Lerner waited with an axe under his coat. 'I thought of it as an honour that I had been chosen to kill a German,' he says. 'We had no choice, we were going to die anyway, but we wanted to die as human beings. I can tell you that when I split his skull in two, it was if I'd been practising for this moment all my life.'"

Die Zeit 22.12.2009

Christoph Schlingensief and friends are back from Burkina Faso where they have been given a five hectare piece of land by the government, to build Africa's first opera house in Remdoogo. Schlingensief, who is undergoing treatment for lung cancer, announced cheerfully: "Christmas this year is a genuinely happy time for me, particularly because my drugs are really kicking in now and have killed off the metastases in the remaining right half of my lungs."Â¬â Set designerThomas Goerge describes the location of the opera house: "It's the edge of the Savannah. Donkeys, goats, zebus cross the road. A dog gets run over. A cyclist lifts the remains of the short-haired grey mongrel onto the back of his bike. I'm thinking: How efficient, not like back in Germany where disintegrating cats are left stuck to the tarmac for everyone to observe. Then I hear loud laughter: 'Dog soup, dog soup today.'"

Der Freitag 23.12.2009

In an interview withthe editors of Freitag editors, writer and filmmaker Alexander Klugeoffers little hope of any realistic alternative to capitalism: "No one I trust has been able to give me a recipe for an alternative, non-clan controlled, non-violent order, which makes people as keen, and gets the goods to Sinkiang." Â¬â But Kluge does have some inspiring words to say about the origins of the Internet: "We should inform people properly about the beginnings of net technology. Swiss precision engineering and Einstein's physics came together at CERN to formulate questions about Quanta, the minutiae which reflect the vastness of the universe. The exchange of information at CERN is so complex that the Internet had to be invented for it to happen. What started out as in-house communication between physicists, then took a detour to the Pentagon, and was eventually appropriated by the whole of mankind! What a wonderful story!"

Die Tageszeitung 28.12.2009

Jutta Lietsch comments on the 11-year sentence for China's leading dissident Liu Xiaobo. "The sentence should be a wake-up call to anyone who is naive enough to believe the assurances of China's leaders that the party wants to change China, slowly but surely, into a constitutional state. The old line that China is too big and complicated to cope with more citizens rights, is a sham. State repression is not on the decrease as functionaries like to pretend."

Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung 28.12.2009

Mark Siemons finds it revealing that Bejing has dealt with the demands Â¬â - and indeed the prison sentence of Liu Xiaobo âÃÄ with its old quietness and secrecy. "The way the state reacted to Liu's demands for a division of powers - the mainstay of Charter 08 which he helped to write - points to embarrassing wound in Chinese development, which is normally kept hidden away. It is now breaking open again under the strain ofÂ¬â contradictory forces: the Communist Party's programme of modernisation, and its unchanging Leninist structure." Â¬â Â¬â Â¬â

Saturday 11 - 17 December, 2010

A clutch of German newspapers launch an appeal against the criminalisation of Wikileaks. Vera Lengsfeld remembers GDR dissident Jürgen Fuchs and how he met death in his cell. All the papers were bowled over Xavier Beauvois' film "Of Gods and Men." The FR enjoys a joke but not a picnic at a staging of Stravinsky's "Rake's Progress" in Berlin. Gustav Seibt provides a lurid description of Napoleonic soap in the SZ. German-Turkish Dogan Akhanli author explains what it feels like to be Josef K. read more

Saturday 4 - Friday 10 December

Colombian writer Hector Abad defends Nobel Prize laureate Mario Vargas Llosa against European Latin-America romantics. Wikileaks dissident Daniel Domscheit-Berg criticises the new publication policy of his former employer. The Sprengel Museum has put on a show of child nudes by die Brücke artists. The SZ takes a walk through the Internet woods with FAZ prophet of doom Frank Schirrmacher. The FAZ is troubled by Christian Thielemann's unstable tempo in the Beethoven cycle. And the FR meets China Free Press publisher, Bao Pu.read more

Saturday 27 November - Friday 3 December

Danish author Frederik Stjernfelt explains how the Left got its culturist ideas. Slavenka Draculic writes about censoring Angelina Jolie who wanted to make a film in Bosnia. Daniel Cohn-Bendit talksÂ¬â Â¬â about his friendship, falling out and reconciliation with Jean-Luc Godard. Wikileaks has caused an embarrassed silence in the Arab world, where not even al-Jazeera reported on the what the sheiks really think. Alan Posener calls for the Hannah Arendt Institute in Dresden to be shut down.read more

Saturday 20 - Friday 26 November, 2010

The theatre event of the week came in a twin pack: Roland Schimmelpfennig's new play, a post-colonial "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf" opened at the Deutsches Theater in Berlin and the Thalia in Hamburg. The anarchist pamphlet "The Coming Insurrection" has at last been translated into German and has ignited the revolutionary sympathies of at least two leading German broadsheets, the FAZ and the SZ. But the taz, Germany's left-wing daily, says the pamphlet is strongly right-wing. What's left and right anyway? came the reply.read more

Saturday 13 - Friday 19 November, 2010

Dieter Schlesak levels grave accusations against his former friend and colleague, Oskar Pastior, who spied on him for the Securitate. Banat-Swabian author and vice chairman of the Oskar Pastior Foundation, Ernest Wichner, turns on Schlesak for spreading malicious rumours. Die Zeit portrays the Berlin rapper Harris, and the moment he knew he was German. Dutch author Cees Nooteboom meditates on the near lust for physical torture in the paintings of Francisco de Zurburan. An exhibition in Mannheim displays the dream house photography of Julius Schulman.read more

Saturday 6 - Friday 12 November, 2010

The NZZ asks why banks invest in art. The FAZ gawps at the unnatural stack of stomach muscles in Michelangelo's drawings. The taz witnesses a giant step for the "Yugo palaver". Bernard-Henri Levy describes Sakineh Ashtiani's impending execution as a test for Iran and the west.Journalist Michael Anti talks about the healthy relationship between the net and the Chinese media. Literary academic Helmut Lethen describes how Ernst Jünger stripped the worker of all organic substances.read more

Saturday 30 October - Friday 5 November, 2010

Now that German TV has just beatifiedPope Pius XII, Rolf Hochmuth tells die Welt where he got the idea for his play "The Deputy". The FR celebrates Elfriede Jelinek's "brilliantly malicious" farce about the collapse of the Cologne City Archive. "Carlos" director Olivier Assayas makes it clear that the revolutionary subject is a figment of the imagination. The SZ returns from the Shanghai Expo with a cloying after-taste of sweet 'n' sour. And historian Wang Hui tells the NZZ that China's intellectuals have plenty of freedom to pose critical questions.read more

Saturday 23 - Friday 29 October, 2010

Author Doron Rabinovici protests against the concessions of moderate Austrian politicians to the FPÖ: recently in Vienna, children were sent back to Kosovo at gunpoint. Ian McEwan wonders why major German novelists didn't mention the Wall. The NZZ looks through the Priz Goncourt shortlist and finds plenty of writers with more bite than Houellebecq. The FAZ outs two of Germany's leading journalists who fiercely guarded the German Foreign Ministry's Nazi past. Jens-Martin Eriksen and Frederik Stjernfelt analyse the symptoms of culturalism, left and right. Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht demonstratively yawns at German debate.read more

Saturday 16 - Friday 22 October, 2010

A new book chronicles the revolt of revolting "third persons" at Suhrkamp publishers in the wild days of 1968. Necla Kelek is appalled by the speech of the very Christian Christian Wulff, the German president, in Turkey. The taz met a new faction of hardcore Palestinians who are fighting for separate sex hairdressing in Gaza. Sinologist Andreas Schlieker reports on the new Chinese willingness to restructure the heart. And the Cologne band Erdmöbel celebrate the famous halo around the frying pan.read more

Saturday 9 - Friday 15 October, 2010

The FR laps up the muscular male bodies and bellies at the Michelangelo exhibition in the Viennese Albertina. The same paper is outraged by the cowardice of the Berlin exhibition "Hitler and the Germans". Mario Vargas-Llosa remembers a bad line from Sweden. Theologist Friedrich Wilhelm Graf makes it very clear that Western values are not Judaeo-Christian values. The Achse des Guten is annoyed by the attempts of the mainstream media to dismiss Mario Vargas-Llosa. The NZZ celebrates the tireless self-demolition of Polish writer and satirist Slawomir Mrozek.read more

Saturday 2 - Friday 8 October, 2010

Nigerian writer Niyi Osundare explains why his country has become uninhabitable. German Book Prize winner Melinda Nadj Abonji says Switzerland only pretends to be liberal. German author Monika Maron is not surethat Islam really does belong to Germany. Russian writer Oleg Yuriev explains the disastrous effects of postmodernism on the Petersburg Hermitage. Argentinian author Martin Caparros describes how the Kirchners have co-opted the country's revolutionary history. And publisher Damian Tabarovsky explains why 2001 was such an explosively creative year for Argentina.read more

Saturday 25 September - Friday 1 October

Three East German theatre directors talk about the trauma of reunification. In the FAZ, Thilo Sarrazin denies accusations that his book propagates eugenics: "I am interested in the interplay of nature and nurture." Polemics are being drowned out by blaring lullabies, author Thea Dorn despairs. Author Iris Radisch is dismayed by the state of the German novel - too much idle chatter, not enough literary clout. Der Spiegel posts its interview with the German WikiLeaks spokesman, Daniel Schmitt. And Vaclav Havel's appeal to award the Nobel prize to Liu Xiabobo has the Chinese authorities pulling out their hair.read more

Saturday 18 - Friday 24 September, 2010

Herta Müller's response to the news that poet Oskar Pastior was a Securitate informant was one of overwhelming grief: "When he returned home from the gulag he was everybody's game." Theatre director Luk Perceval talks about the veiled depression in his theatre. Cartoonist Molly Norris has disappeared after receiving death threats for her "Everybody Draw Mohammed" campaign. The Berliner Zeitung approves of the mellowing in Pierre Boulez' music. And Chinese writer Liao Yiwu, allowed to leave China for the first time, explains why schnapps is his most important writing tool.read more

Saturday 10 - Friday 17 September, 2010

The poet Oskar Pastior was a Securitate informant, the historian Stefan Sienerth has discovered. Biologist Veronika Lipphardt dismisses Thilo Sarrazin'sincendiary intelligence theories as a load of codswallop. A number of prominent Muslim intellectuals in Germany have written an open letter to President Christian Wulff, calling for him to "make a stand for a democratic culture based on mutual respect." And a Shell study has revealed that Germany's youth aspire to be just like their parents.read more

Saturday 4 - Friday 10 September, 2010

Thilo Sarrazin has buckled under the stress of the past two weeks and resigned from the board of the Central Bank. His book, "Germany is abolishing itself", however, continues to keep Germany locked in a debate about education and immigration and intelligence. Also this week, Mohammed cartoonist Kurt Westergaard has been awarded the M100 prize for defending freedom of opinion. Chancellor Angela Merkel gave a speech at the award ceremony: "The secret of freedom is courage". The FAZ interviewed Westergaard, who expressed his disappointment that the only people who had shown him no support were those of his own class. read more